1. Technical Field
This invention relates in general to managing workflow in consumable resources using a job scheduler and more particularly, to workflow control of flexible reservations for scheduling a reservation for uninterrupted use of a selection of consumable resources for specified duration of time by jobs bound to the reservation, as the selection of consumable resources become available, wherein the flexible reservations are prioritized relative to regular jobs and other workflow.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computing environments comprising one or more machines, viewed as a cluster, grid, or other type of distributed computing environment, are typically managed by at least one scheduler. The scheduler manages the flow of jobs to machine resources, such as processors, memory, and disk drives. As the popularity of distributed computing environments increases, these environments become busier and management of the workload on the machine resources increases in complexity. Poor management of a the use of machine resources within a distributed computing environment increases the likelihood that some machine resources may remain unused while jobs are also left unprocessed or rejected, the jobs that are processed experience delays, and the unnecessary addition of temporary or additional permanent machine resources to the distributed computing environment.
In addition, within a distributed computing environment, the available consumable resources may also include shared, floating resources such as software licenses and network bandwidth. Poor management of floating resources within a distributed computing environment increases the likelihood that jobs will unnecessarily compete for floating resources and that jobs already dispatched to machine resources for running, also needing floating resources to execute, will stall while waiting for other jobs to finish with and release floating resources.